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It’s not as if Brian Mulroney waited until last week, and the 25th anniversary of the landmark Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between Canada and the U.S., to take a victory lap for what he describes as a trade pact that is “the greatest in the history of the world.”

“Canadians are so resistant to change,” Mulroney told 700 loyalists gathered to fete him at University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Business. One hears, Mulroney said, that “’Canadians are wonderful people. Just tell them the truth and they’ll deal with it.’” With no small trace of bitterness, Mulroney said “Don’t you ever believe that in Canadian politics!”

Actually, Mulroney was describing a United States that remains resistant to gay rights and gun control, and not Canadians, who long ago embraced metric, Medicare, official bilingualism and multiculturalism, gays in the military and same-sex marriage, and Quebec as a distinct nation within Canada.

But say this for PM, now 20 years out of office: Mulroney was ahead of his time on free trade. Reneging on a 1984 promise not to open free-trade talks with the Yanks, Mulroney was prompted to do so by undeniable facts. These included a growing protectionist sentiment in the U.S.; an expanding free-trade block in Europe; and a 1985 Canadian royal commission on economic prospects that called for a “leap of faith” in forging still closer economic ties with the U.S.

Actually, that wasn’t such a leap of faith, given the immense benefits by then evident from the mid-1960s Auto Pact. The FTA was soon expanded to include Mexico (NAFTA) by Liberals who just six years earlier had thrown everything they had into defeating Mulroney and the FTA.

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The advocates of free trade in 1988, which was opposed by this newspaper and by Ontario, have since been vindicated. Canada, with just 0.5 per cent of the world’s population, is the 11th-largest economy on the planet. Its per capita income has eclipsed that of the U.S., at $50,000 for Canadians and $48,000 in the U.S. By 2008, free trade among Canada, the U.S. and Mexico had more than tripled since the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect in 1994, to $930 billion.

The world is shrinking, not so obvious when the FTA negotiations began in 1986, but manifestly so now. Low-cost skilled labour in the Pacific Rim and South Asia, and industrial revolutions underway in China and India, are among the clearest signs of an increasingly globalized economy. Meanwhile, Brazil has quietly emerged as the sixth-largest economy.

Free trade, with all its blessings and disruptive challenges, is the new world order of the 21st century. Canada is close to completing negotiations on its most ambitious free trade pact ever, the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA) with the vast European market of more than 350 million people. CETA promises to be a boon to Canadian exporters of agricultural products, textiles and forest products, among others. And in parallel, Canada is negotiating a Strategic Partnership Agreement with the Europeans on more uniform justice policies and counter-terrorism practices.

For its part, the U.S., at the initiative of a U.S. president hailing from the traditionally protectionist Democratic Party, is placing its hopes for export growth and domestic job creation on a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), in tandem with a Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA) akin to CETA. By securing CETA ahead of TAFTA, Canada has set its own terms and won’t have to accede to a TAFTA that is a fait accompli.

Ontario was the vociferous holdout to the FTA in 1988, its manufacturers having hidden behind a tariff wall since Sir John A’s National Policy. Ontario was to lose more than 200,000 manufacturing jobs in the 2000s alone, even before the Great Recession. Then again, an Ontario wine industry forced to abandon protectionism by the World Trade Organization has since emerged as one of the leading New World high-quality wine producers. And Ontario firms like auto-parts giants Magna International Inc and Linamar Corp. learned to become among the most efficient, innovative and cost-competitive manufacturers on Earth.

Acknowledging this new reality back in 2008, a prominent Canadian politician defended Mulroney’s push for more liberated trade with the U.S., saying, “We are interdependent. What is good for one is good for all. To go backwards, when competitors in the European Union and South Asia are becoming increasingly integrated and productive, would be a mistake.”

That was then-Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty. His progressive if largely botched Green Plan might yet pay off with a CETA that, among other things, opens the door wider to Canadian exports to Europe of waste management, alternative energy, pollution cleanup and other made-in-Ontario environmental technologies.

Mulroney’s legacy is decidedly mixed. But placing Canada in the vanguard of free trade is among the few nearly unalloyed triumphs he can claim.

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